


Medicinally

by castiiron



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blow Jobs, M/M, chapter 6 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 15:27:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16684198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castiiron/pseuds/castiiron
Summary: “You stayin’?” Arthur asks, surprised. He’s used to their ritual of John slipping out of the tent with his pants half undone and Arthur pretending like he didn't have bruises lining the length of his neck the next morning.“Someone’s gotta make sure you ain't gonna die in your sleep."





	Medicinally

It rains the night they bring John home, loud against the roof of Arthur’s tent. He had decided to let himself rest, the excitement of the prison break gave him a tight chest, lungs burning when he breathed in the mountainous air.

The camp is quiet, their numbers dwindling. Those that are left in low spirits, in a constant state of nervousness. Their supplies are worryingly low, not enough food to waste on celebrations. Not that there was anything to celebrate anymore. John’s return had barely even been acknowledged, besides Dutch’s berations and Micah’s dirty, entitled glares. Abigail had been grateful and John had escaped the noose for the time being. That was all that mattered.

Arthur’s glad he’d fixed his tent with sides, the weather at Roanoke Ridge is as cruel to the gang as it is to his own declining condition. _‘Find someplace dry and relaxing’_ the doctor had said before Arthur had coughed out a laugh. He’d love to be given a choice, love to have somewhere dry and relaxing without the low hanging dollar sign above his head. There was no dry land left that he hadn’t muddied up with the blood of others.

He lays in his cot with a bundle of clothes under his head as a makeshift pillow and looks at the photos on the wagon next to him through the dim moonlight streaming through the gaps of fabric. Pretends his chest isn’t protesting with every breath he tries to inhale. The photo of Dutch, Hosea and him from when he looked as young as Kieran had been. Twenty-two at the most, stubble free, no slouch in his back. They were happy, maybe a little liquor soaked, but happy. Hosea had dragged them into the photo booth, wanting a memory of the gang different to the ones that hung up in sheriff offices. Genuine and human. They asked for three copies. Sadie had told him Hosea had died with his in his breast pocket, next to bullet hole that had killed him. They buried him with it.

Arthur wonders if Dutch keeps his as safe, or whether he has tossed it at the bottom of his bag to be forgotten about, or perhaps in the mud back at one of their previous camps, decaying at the same slow pace as Arthur’s lungs.

The rain on the tarp above his head lulls him and his aching head. It's been a trying few weeks and he’s not entirely sure he has still recovered from his near death experience in the middle of the ocean. He’s grateful he had been taught how to swim. Grateful that it had been him that was tossed overboard and not someone like John who had never had the privilege.

John had been the lucky one in the end. Sent, alive to prison while the rest of them bled out on the roofs of Saint Denis, or weaved through damp foliage and ricocheting bullets in the thick heat of Guarma.

Maybe that’s what had set his chest on fire all of a sudden, that all encompassing wet heat. The ocean water he had coughed out of his lungs a likely contributor. He doesn’t know how this disease worked, but it is intent on killing him, slowly. That much was clear.

How long is he going to be able to see this out? Is there going to be a day where he gets up in the morning and falls straight back down again? Or one where he never wakes up at all? He does his best not to think on it in case it might turn him insane.

Arthur’s drifting off when he hears his name from outside his tent, in that scratch of a whisper he has long since become acquainted to.

“You awake?” John asks, poking his head through the entrance.

“Well I am now,” Arthur complains, sitting up on tired arms.

“Don’t get up,” John commands, kicking his boots off at the edge of the cot, pushing Arthur back down with a hand to his chest.

John bossed him around as if he’d forgotten Arthur was significantly older than him. As if Arthur hadn’t won Dutch’s favour years before John had even set foot in camp. Years of letting John get away with his own smug complacency, he guesses. Arthur had never really been as strict on the kid as he should have been.

John had wanted attention. Attention from Dutch, attention from Arthur. While Dutch had been resistant, John had broken Arthur into a lenient mess. He knew how to get what he wanted, a master at twisting Arthur around his fingers, both figuratively and literally. When John had first got down on his knees for him, Arthur had a hard time pretending it was a bad idea. John had been young and pretty, skin so smooth and unmarred it had looked out of place next to Arthur’s own.

Yet John continued to come to him when he needed it, even more so after Arthur had pressed him into the mattress and watched as that bold confidence turned into soft compliance, John taking a step back to let Arthur show him a time only he could give.

This isn't the first time John has slipped into the space beside him. He is used to accommodating another grown man in the single cot, turning onto his side to let John lay on his back, despite how his lungs protested at the twist. Arthur coughs hoarse and painful, John doesn’t bring it up despite the pinch between his brows.

“Alright, fill me in full. None of that half detailed horseshit,” John demands, scratching the stubble at his cheek before closing his eyes.

Arthur looks over the scars on John’s cheek, still as raw as they were months ago. Skin too thin to heal over any more than they already had. They almost shine under the light of the moon. John has always been good on the eyes, almost excessively so. Maybe the wolf attack was the work of a higher being, taking some of John’s attractiveness as it weren’t fair for one man to possess so much. Except Arthur never though it a blight, only adding to his charming roguishness.

Arthur sighs, tired with the warmth of another body pressing against his own. He tells John about Saint Denis, about Hosea and how he’d looked before they shot him in the back. About Lenny and how enthusiastic he had been jumping across city roofs. He tells John where they’re buried, how Sadie and the others had fetched them from the city and brought them back, to rest them in a place of peace. Respectfully, as rightfully deserved.

“They were family,” John repeats, as he had in the valley on the way back to the camp. They were family. Hosea a father figure to them both. Lenny, a younger brother.

“I know,” Arthur whispers over the rain.

He tells John about Guarma, how the flies stuck to sweat like it was mud, how the insects were louder than an incessant train whistle. He goes into detail about how it felt to drown, how heavy the water felt in his lungs, how the sun scorched his face when he awoke on the beach, how the sand reflected the light into his eyes and blinded him helplessly.

His puts his arm over John’s chest under the guise of comfort, when the need for human contact is too much. Arthur feels him breathing, chest rising slowly and easily in a way that Arthur wished his own would too. Arthur closes his eyes and rests his head against his free hand while he tells John about the ugly way’s Dutch chose to kill, how he’d got worse since the bank, about the old lady he’d strangled in the caves for no dammed reason. He tells him how heavy and powerful the gatling gun felt under his hands, how he felt it shake him to his very core as he opened fire on the law in the Bayou.

“All this time I thought I’d drawn the short end of the stick,” John says when Arthur has finished his retelling, the weight of it all hanging heavy in the silence.

Arthur hums out a noncommittal reply, exhausted. It has only been a couple of days since Guarma and he’s barely had the time to stop to breathe with the law snapping at their heels.

They’re both quiet, listening to the rain above their heads, Arthur tries to ignore the soft wheeze that comes with his inhales.

“Dutch wasn’t gonna come get me was he?” John asks after a while, Arthur can almost hear his brain running at a mile a minute, piecing together the changes.

“I ain’t sure.”

“A day or two more and I would have hung.”

“I know.”

John turns on his side, so they’re face to face. Arthur opens one eye to peek at the man, his arm now shifted to drape over John’s waist.

“Thank you, Arthur,” John says, his voice strained with the shame of having to thank someone for digging him out of the mess he had made himself. Arthur is used to it.

“It’s nothin’,” Arthur mumbles back.

John’s hand is cold when it comes to press against his chest, slipping under the shirt and vest he’d unbuttoned halfway when he had prepared to sleep. Arthur inhales at the shock of it, the sudden air into his lungs forcing out a cough that he turns to let out in the fabric of the makeshift pillow.

“You gonna tell me about that?” John asks, feeling Arthur’s chest wheeze under his hand. “Or do I have to hear it from the gossip that floats ‘round camp?”

“It ain’t anything you need worry about,”

“You’ve always been a bad liar.”

John doesn’t need to know the extent of it. This is a burden he has to bear, a consequence of actions that were nothing but his own. He’ll suffer alone, because it’s what he deserves.

“It’s killin’ you,” John says matter of factly, as if Arthur needs reminding. “Can see it in your face, you got blood creepin’ into the whites of your eyes. Did you know that?”

He does. He’s heard talk from the streets, his likeness to a corpse. Arthur tended not to look in mirrors to begin with but since he fell off his horse that first time in Saint Denis, he’s been avoiding any reflective surface like the plague. He knows, oh he knows.

“You’re startin’ to look like an old man,” John says, in a way that could be taken as a joke if there were anything to joke about in a situation like this.

“I’ve always looked like an old man.”

“Naw,” John says. Kind Arthur thinks. He’s always been too kind for this undeserving world. “You never looked old to me.”

Arthur huffs a laugh at the situation. At John’s eagerness to appease, even now as he lay with a cough that sounds more like a dogs bark.

“You don’t have to humour me.”

“I ain’t,” John says, lifting himself up to sit on his hands before tugging Arthur’s arm in attempt to get him to lay on his back. “Lemme help you out then, it’s been a while.”

Arthur doesn’t protest, watching as John straddles his waist and undoes his belt as easy as his own. He can feel his heart beating in his ears, already starting to twitch before John has even got his hands on him.

Maybe it has been a while.

“You don’t gotta…” Arthur starts, wanting to make sure John isn't just doing this as another way of thanking him for their prison break this afternoon. His voice catches in his throat when John licks him, slow and attentively.

His hands are rough and calloused like Arthur knows them to be. One on the base of his dick, the other unbuttoning his garments the rest of the way down, running through the hair on his chest, coming to rest on his stomach to stop the insatiable urge John knows Arthur has to lift his hips to meet mouth. He presses his arm there as if to say _‘relax, sunshine, this is for you’_.

Arthur wishes he could think, he wishes the buzz in his brain would clear so he could focus on how John looked with his brazen mouth around his cock. But his breath is even shorter than usual and he struggles to get a grasp on anything that isn’t the heat that bubbles in the pit of his stomach, that makes his muscles clench and wish he could have more than just John’s mouth.

Arthur runs his hand through John’s hair and down to his jaw, feeling the bumps of the scars on John’s hollowed out cheeks. He groans when the golden boy slinks down lower, until his nose is pressed right against Arthur’s hips and his tongue flattens out and moves against the base of his dick.

“Marston,” Arthur croaks around broken huffs, feeling the coil in his gut burn and boil as it threatens to come undone, as John works him well enough for Arthur to forget he is dying, even just for a minute. Or perhaps, supplying him with a sweeter kind of death. Isn’t that what they call it in France? A small death. A brief weakening of consciousness. Arthur would gladly die hundreds of times over if that is what was promised.

Arthur is already tilting on the edge before John lets out a strangled groan, the unexpected vibration takes him off guard and the intoxicating sound John had just made is all that’s needed to toss Arthur into the abyss. He goes willingly, blissfully and loudly.  
  
Coughing, loudly.

He feels his lungs burn as he comes down, his body already exhausted before John had dragged it to the other side of the extreme, forced his heart to beat dangerously in his chest.

“Hey, hey,” John soothes, still sitting over him, a hand to his chest in attempt to settle the fire that raged behind his ribs. “Breathe, Morgan.”

Arthur tries, he does, but the more he coughs the harder it is to stop. John grabs his hand and places it to his own chest, forcing Arthur to feel his deep breathing, in and out. Encouraging him to time it with his own, until the coughs have subsided and the tears in his eyes have dried up.

Arthur turns and spits blood into the dirt beside the cot.

“You alive?” John asks, after he has recovered.

“You almost had murder on your hands there, Martson,” Arthur replies carefully, laying back and wiping his mouth on the back of his arm.

“Nothin’ new then,” John jokes, clambering off his lap and nudging him to shift to the side again so he can lay back down.

“Sorry,” Arthur apologises, when the rain becomes audible over the ringing in his ears once again. “I ain’t think I got it in me to return the favour.”

“I wasn’t lookin’ for it,” John replies, settling in beside him for the night, pulling the makeshift pillow out from behind Arthur’s head to slide under his own.

“You stayin’?” Arthur asks surprised. He’s used to their old ritual of John slipping out the tent with his pants half undone and Arthur pretending like he didn’t have bruises lining the length of his neck the next morning.

“Someone’s gotta make sure you ain't gonna die in your sleep."

Arthur huffs, taking John’s comment as more of an insult than sweet. “I ain’t done yet.”

“I sure hope not,” John mumbles tiredly against the arm that Arthur has curled up in the minimal space they share between their bodies.

He’ll fight this, fight it until the gang is safe, until there’s not even a hint of them on the wind for the law to sniff out. Until John can live a kind of life where he might be able to raise his son into normalcy. The kind that neither Arthur or John ever had.

Arthur breathes and it hurts, but he sure as hell ain’t done yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Twitter: [@castiiron](https://twitter.com/castiiron)  
> Tumblr: [@castiiron](https://castiiron.tumblr.com)


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